Already Burnt Down

As I write this, the nation is on fire, and I am preparing to play music over Zoom for Greenpoint Reformed Church. (Startlingly, today is the most fiery day on the church calendar, Pentecost, and this old minor-key banger will be our main hymn.) I have been contemplating playing this Rufus Wainwright number for some time during the Trump era—I've already trotted out Dylan's "Hard Rain" a few times after particularly rough weeks. But now seems like the day. Though written in 2007 in response largely to the Iraq War, and though written by a Canadian with some sense of remove from the U.S., there's nothing in the song I can't sign onto. Our country's violent white supremacist past is never dead; it's not even past.

Musically it's one of Wainwright's more straightforward tunes, and it's all the more striking for it. That also gives its judiciously employed harmonic surprises that much more operatic power. The song is F-minor but doesn't arrive at that home key until after eight bars, and on the key word, "America." It all flows from there with the momentum of rage and despair, and I would just note two ear-bending chord changes late in the piece. The first is here:

And the second example uses the same three-note figure, bringing home the song with a bursting forth into major, then a crushing fall into an elongated spelled-out F-minor:

I won't be able to reach the full power of that climax sans choir, but I will be feeling it.